My mother slept with an AK47 by her bed to protect us. Now I want to make London’s streets safer

Her mother kept an AK47 by her bed to protect her family from marauding gangs – now she wants hopes to be the Tory candidate for London mayor in a bid to help Londoners feel safer.

Sara Gezdari was 13 when she left her native Albania for Italy to escape the civil war which engulfed the country in 1997 after its brutal communist regime had fallen a few years before.

On the shortlist of three to be the Tory candidate for London mayor, Ms Gezdari, a 42-year-old businesswoman, single mum and recent candidate from the London borough of Richmond, has become one of the party’s emerging stars.

But, while she now lives in London’s leafiest borough, she has not forgotten her origins.

“One of the most traumatic experiences that I have is at the time as a child in Albania. Sleeping in this little house and being confined from weeks and weeks, not being able to go to school, not being able to walk on the street unless you had a male figure next to you, like your dad or cousin, someone that would accompany you, because young girls would be kidnapped and sold to the international prostitution market,” she told The Independent.

The constant fear meant her mother Elvana, a former gymnast who became a doctor, slept with an AK47 next to her bed before they moved to Italy.

“It was there just for a sense of security, because we had the internal bands that would jump into the house and rob them, abuse women,” she remembers.

Conservative members in London will on Monday receive their ballot papers to decide whether Ms Gezdari, former foreign secretary Sir James Cleverly or former Bedfordshire police and crime commissioner Festus Akinbusoye should run for mayor in 2028.

Ms Gezdari, who stood in Richmond Park in the 2024 general election, losing to the Lib Dem MP Sarah Olney – who is also expected to run for mayor – admits she is “the wildcard” option for the Tories.

She believes it is her childhood that has shaped her political beliefs.

“I think that’s why I studied politics at Bologna [University],” she muses, a place where one of her lecturers was the former Italian prime minister and European Commission President Romano Prodi.

Despite having a leading Eurocrat help shape her in academia, she is not going to get drawn on her views on Brexit, even though the current Labour mayor and likely opponent Lord Sir Sadiq Khan wants to turn Brexit into a campaign issue.

“He’s focused on what happened 10 years ago with Brexit, and very passionate about apologising for the slavery and paying reparations, instead of looking at what the present looks like for Londoners,” she says. “He should be worried about the 349,000 people unemployed in London.”

Her family connection with the UK began in 1982, two years before she was born, when her father Edmond, a former professional footballer, was playing Belfast club Linfield in the European Cup for his club 17 Nëntori Tiranë. Linfield offered him a contract which he signed.

But his thoughts of escaping the Communist regime were short-lived.

“He got a call from somebody from the government in Albania saying, ‘if you do accept and you stay, your entire family will be persecuted. Your mum, your brother, your dad, your sister. We’ve got a place already in the mountains.’

“He had to go back even though he was passionate about football and this was the biggest opportunity of his life.”

She describes many of the political issues she is fighting on – whether it is personal freedom, business growth or law and order – as “incredibly personal to me”, especially when she thinks about her two children Edoardo and Sofia.

She says it is why she wants police patrols and focussing on crime hotspots as one of her main policies. But a desire to support freedom is also important to her.

“I want my son, if he wants to play football, to be able to sign with any country because he’s got the opportunity to do that and nobody’s going to put me to jail if he does.”

She carefully sticks to her party’s hard line on leaving the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) and clamping down on immigration, things which have helped her in the past.

“I am a successful story of immigration, and there are many people like me. Unfortunately, what we have seen as well in the last couple of years is that a lot of people have come to this country to benefit from the system and make it unsafe.”

But she does have a firm reply to the argument put forward by Reform’s Suella Braverman and Zia Yusuf that she and they cannot be English or British because they have the wrong ethnicity.

She had a spat with Mr Yusuf when he posted on X about the winning Labour Holborn and St Pancras Sagal Abdi-Wali, who came to the UK as a child refugee, not being English because of her name.

“I couldn’t disagree more with both Suella Braverman and Zia Yuzuf. I don’t think we should judge people based on the geography of where they were born or where their family was born.”

She adds with a glint in her eye: “Otherwise we wouldn’t have Layla Cunningham as a London mayor candidate for Reform.

“I think we should judge people based on culture, values, principles, and respect for laws.

“People like me who come here, embrace, welcome, and really enjoy being British. We have a sense of pride in it.”